Booksellers’ Stalls in the Kingdom of Ewistar, Part 1

02 Jun, 2024

Last week I mentioned that one of my players asked if his character could buy a book in the campaign; this started me on the road to creating texts and genres for my setting (link). In particular, though, he asked if he could go to a bookstore to buy a book as a gift for an NPC as part of the PCs’ matchmaking attempt (more on that later).

Bookstores as we think of them, however, did not exist in England in the 1590s, the time and place I’m using as a rough basis for the non-fantastic elements of my setting. They certainly didn’t exist in medieval Europe, the more standard basis for fantasy roleplaying games. Most GMs would include bookstores in their game anyway, but fortunately I was able to pull a suitable alternative from late 16th-century London: booksellers’ stalls.

Printers at Work, c.1590, Johannes Stradanus

If you lived in England in the time of Shakespeare and you wanted to buy a book, your best bet would be the booksellers’ stalls of St. Paul’s Churchyard, where foreign and domestic printers would sell their wares, though nearby Paternoster Row also had its fair share of booksellers’ stalls. Rather than going to a bookstore, then, you would go to one of a few book markets. (See the Map of Early Modern London’s “Bookselling at Paul’s Churchyard” for a bit more detail on that.)

I know a bit about the development of bookselling in English literature due to my excessive formal education; I don’t have a bibliography to hand, though, instead relying on a porridge of half-remembered sources. Rather than sharing uncited information I will attempt to summarize briefly for now: it took a long time, and many social and technological developments, before bookselling became economical. Indeed, it really wasn’t economical until the early modern period. If you care about economic and technological plausibility in your tabletop setting, you need three things to justify a bookselling culture:

1. printing presses, because copying manuscripts by hand is labour-intensive;
2. abundant paper rather than papyrus, parchment, or vellum, which are unsuitable for printing, and;
3. relatively high literacy rates, so you have people who actually want to buy books.

That points toward the early modern period, maybe the late medieval period at the earliest. Of course if you are a GM you are free to disregard any kinds of plausibility you like, understanding that doing so might strain your players’ suspension of disbelief. Magic and gnomish craft can explain away quite a lot.

At any rate, I told my players that, although they would not be able to find a bookstore (and indeed their characters had never heard of such a thing), they could find booksellers’ stalls in the marketplace, and to the marketplace they went.

The player was looking in particular for a book of love poetry or the like. A goliath NPC named Skywatcher had helped his PC compose a long poem in Giant for plot reasons, during the course of which.she taught him a bit about her people’s poetic traditions; furthermore, the players got the impression that she was romantically interested in another goliath NPC named Bearkiller and they wanted to encourage that relationship. Therefore this player thought a gift of a book of poetry would be a suitable thank-you for Skywatcher’s help that would also double as part of the party’s matchmaking gambit. This meant that I needed to make up some books for him to choose from.

The Booksellers’ Wares: Love Poetry and the Like

Romances

Although we nowadays use the term romances to mean stories about romantic love, originally the term meant an adventure story, which is how I’m using it here.

• Dwellers of the Forbidden City: an adventure tale involving the yuan-ti and a distant jungle continent (the title is taken from a chapter in Wizards of the Coast’s 2017 Tomb of Annihilation)
• Into the Mists: a gothic romance involving many tragic figures that nonetheless has a proper love story between its protagonists (again, the title is taken from chapter of a Wizards of the Coast book, this time 2016’s Curse of Strahd)
• Slaves of Sune: a tedious allegory for romantic love
• Where the River Goes: smut involving a forbidden love affair between a half-orc and a human merchant’s daughter (based on a similar book in the second campaign of Critical Role)

Drow Romances

A subgenre I made up based on the gothic romances and the orientalist writing of the Romantic period (an anachronism, I know), the surface dwellers’ drow romances are all salacious and all exoticize the drow. As it happens, my players did not encounter this genre in the marketplace scene, but I made sure to introduce some of these texts to the party later, before they ventured into the Underdark.

• Escape from the Underdark: derivative of Prisoners of the Drow, leaning much harder on taboo-breaking sexuality
• Keptolo’s Dart: first of a trilogy, with an exciting story, compelling characters, and interesting court machinations, but lots of trashy self-indulgent prurient elements; told from the point of view of a drow protagonist
• Keptolo’s Justice: second of the trilogy
• Keptolo’s Legacy: third of the trilogy
• Prisoners of the Drow: the original of the genre; it is actually well-written, for all its sensationalism and taboo-breaking
• Widowed in the City of Spiders: the first of the genre to tell the story from a drow character’s point of view, though it is still salacious and exoticizing

Comedies

As with romance, our use of the term comedy has strayed from the original; although different schemas use the term slightly differently, it mostly means a story with a happy ending, with no regard to whether it is funny.

• Galithaea and Filiade: a human-written closet drama about elves which ends with Corellon giving Galithaea and Filiade the ability to change one another’s sex (based on the real early modern play Gallathea by Lyly, in which two girls disguised as boys fall in love with each other, and which has one of the strangest and most charming endings of any early modern play I’ve read)
• The Night Hanali Slept: a prose comedy in which a complicated mess of romantic entanglements resolves into several monogamous marriages (based on Shakespeare’s so-called Senecan comedies, such as Twelfth Night, As You Like It, and Much Ado About Nothing)
• Oberon and Titania: a closet drama about a quarrel between married archfey and the havoc this causes for nearby mortals (based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

Sonnets

Among the forms I’ve included, this is one of the few that really would be sold by London’s booksellers in the 1590s. In case you are unfamiliar, a sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines with a particular kind of meter (or rhythm) and one a few possible rhyme schemes; it also has a shift in tone between the eighth and ninth lines. Sonnets are mostly lyrical poems, meaning they are subjective: they are written in the first person and express sensations, emotions, or experiences. A collection of sonnets that tell a story when taken together is called a sonnet sequence.

• The Bunkmate’s Epithalamium: a supposedly-mock sonnet sequence and epithalamium concerning a sailor’s “sea marriage,” or matelotage (based on Spenser’s Epithalamium, Shakespeare’s Golden Boy sonnets, and the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg in Melville’s Moby Dick; I say it is a supposedly-mock sonnet sequence because it hides a genuine expression of desire behind a satirical façade)
• The Couch of Sune: a sonnet sequence of terrible quality, being boring, strained, and overly serious (based on the Couch of Eros, terrible poetry written by a character in Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia)
• Luthic by Moonlight: a half-orc sonnet sequence / “fertility aid” with the original Orcish on one page and a Common translation on the facing page, though the translation substantially censors the material
• Pond of Lilies: a collection of mostly awful sonnets, some of them plagiarized (based on the plagiarization of Shakespeare’s sonnets in his own day)
• Songs of the Seasons: a well-written sonnet sequence with astrological imagery, and the book that set off the current fashion for sonnet sequences (based on Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella)

Collections

These are short prose stories published together, sometimes with a frame narrative and sometimes not.

• The Fishermen’s Catch: a collection of stories about love in spare but beautiful prose, including two comedies, two romances, and one tragedy, all of them bittersweet
• The Knights of Milil: a collection of several love songs, ribald tales, tragedies of heartbreak, and chivalric romances, with a frame narrative of several bards (the so-called knights of Milil) telling the tales (based on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron)

Tragi-Romances

As the name implies, these are tragedy-romance hybrids.

• The Knight of Leather and Feathers: the adventures of a tragic figure, the eponymous knight (based on a book with a similar title in the second campaign of Critical Role, which in turn might be based on events in the first campaign of the same show)
• Reunion in Avernus: a story about a relationship (frenemies to lovers to enemies to lovers to enemies to enemy-lovers) which starts with the participants alive but transitions to Avernus about halfway through, after they kill one another

Picaresques

A picaresque is a prose story, normally episodic, of a roguish but mostly good-natured protagonist living by their wits in corrupt society. Though these protagonists rarely adhere to social norms, they also aren’t usually criminals. Picaresques often have a realist style and a comedic or satirical element.

• The Tressym and the Snake: a story about two rival scoundrels stealing each other’s hearts while trying to out-rogue one another

The PC, incidentally, went with Songs of the Seasons, though the half-orc member of the party was interested in Luthic by Moonlight.

Looking back over these works now, there are some things I’d change. First of all, I made all of this to fit a particular need in the game at the moment, which biased it toward stories about love and lust. Although those are very common artistic subjects, they aren’t the only ones, and I wouldn’t want to focus so heavily on that in future.

Second, although stealing section headings from Wizards of the Coast books made sense in the moment, I think it potentially diminishes the kind of immersion that creating a robust literary scene could otherwise achieve. The allusions to Critical Role and Jacqueline Carey novels have the same problem. (For whatever reason, I don’t feel that ripping off Gallathea or A Midsummer Night’s Dream mars the immersion to the same degree, and I don’t know why that is. I’d be happy to hear your thoughts in the comments.)¹

I am quite happy with the drow romances and the sonnets in general, though. It satisfies my sense of plausibility to invent the works that defined the genre: the text that created the appetite for the genre, a text that prompted a shift in it, and examples of both good and bad quality. Literary genres and forms do have histories, after all, and emerge from specific cultural, political, and material conditions; if something like realism or immersion is the goal, then it would be good to suggest those origins. I think it might be worth using fewer genres and forms if it meant I could spend more time building up histories and trends in each one.

But the works above aren’t the only ones I made for the party’s visit to the booksellers’ stalls. No literary scene consists only of work about romantic desire; to create a more immersive scene, I invented more of the literary context in which all of these works exist. I will share these with you in the next post of this series